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FIRST MEETING OF THE WARRING STATES WORKING GROUP, UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS
ALVIN P. COHEN
SINOLOGICAL CONFERENCE REPORT
Department of Asian Languages and Literatures
University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Amherst MA 01003-7505 Contact: Professor Alvin P Cohen (413 545-4956, 253-5558),
Coordinator
Professor E Bruce Brooks (413 584-1810, 584-0331)
WARRING STATES WORKING GROUP
A Warring States Working Group was established in June 1993 under the sponsorship of the Department of Asian Languages and Literatures and the Dean of the College of Humanities and Fine Arts at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, to criticize and extend the comprehensive theory of Warring State text chronology which has been developed over the past 20 years by Adjunct Professor of Chinese E. Bruce Brooks.
The theory is a consistent application of the view, expressed by several 19th and 20th century scholars but not systematically pursued, that many of these texts are not monolithic compilations, but consist at least in part of material added by later followers of the school founder. Professor Brooks has first attempted to identify layering in individual texts on formal, linguistic, and other internal grounds, and then to stratigraphically match the single-text sequences with each other by joining the separated halves of interchanges such as the ongoing dialogue between the Micians and the Confucians, and finally to assign absolute dates to the resulting construct from references to contemporary events and similar evidence. The ultimate goal is to produce a firmly dated inclusive chronology in terms of which longstanding questions of inconsistency in a single text, or the pattern of influence between two philosophical schools, can at last be resolved, and from which the history of the period, both intellectual and material, can for the first time be directly read.
The Working Group established to scrutinize the present state of this